Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Number Podcast. And I have a question for you. Where does your head go when I say idolatry and witchcraft? I mean, maybe it goes right to the Bible because it's a Bible podcast. And so your head's already there a little bit. But let's say somebody just walked up to you on the street and yelled those two words right at you. Nope. That doesn't work as an exercise either because your head would go to what the heck just happened. Just randomly, if you see those words on a page somewhere, what do you picture? What do you imagine? Do you think of something now? Do you think of something old? What sector of culture do you imagine? Here's what I'm driving at. I don't know that I'm teasing this out very well, but I picture idolatry and witchcraft. My knee-jerk reactions to these are things that happen somewhere far, far away in different kinds of cultures than the one in which I live, or things that happened a very long time ago. So idolatry. Okay, look, I've read the Bible a whole bunch. The Old Testament and things like that. So what do I picture? Well, I picture the stuff that the pagans, or I guess you didn't call them pagans back then, but that the, you know, the other nations did, the idolatrous foreign nations that surrounded the Israelites in the Old Testament. They had all these made-up gods that were local, regional, ethnic deities who were kind of only good for one particular thing most of the time. Like they weren't good at crops and then also human fertility and also war. Most of them are only good at like one thing. So you need a whole bunch of gods for these idolatrous nations to worship, and they all demanded a sacrifice. Pele demands one. Throw something into the fire. You have to. And unfortunately, a lot of these idolatrous fake gods demanded people for the sacrifice, particularly b babies among the Canaanites, the neighbors of the Israelites in the Old Testament. So that's ick. Idolatry in general, though, it doesn't just stay with the outsiders. The one of the main threats, one of the main villains or problems or cycles of failure of the Old Testament is that these people are supposed to be sanctified, if you will, God's chosen people. They're supposed to be set apart, uh holy, they're supposed to be different from the people around them. Well, like what are the two things that they're just constantly suckers for? One, weird sex stuff, and two, they're suckers for idolatry. They marry people and have relations with people who God told them not to in ways that God told them not to, and as a result, they mingle these godless iron and bronze age societal ideas and values with the stuff of God. And then when that happens, when I mean the way the Bible describes it is the men of Israel would marry women from other tribes, probably to gain financial or military or landholding advantages, but they would do this. And then the accusation of the prophets in the Old Testament is the women would lead the men of Israel to worship their gods. I get it. Put all your 21st century disclaimers on there about the I'm not trying to say like women are bad or all temptresses, like the dudes obviously went out and married them. They knew what they were doing. But also, come on, you probably know what a household is like. And a lot of times, where the woman leads on spiritual things, hey, the family will follow. Well, in the Old Testament, what the Bible says is that this was a problem. This cycle kept happening again and again and again. And so, as a result of the greed of the Hebrew men, the Israelite men, the Jewish men, and as a result of their foreign wives who they married, who, I mean, they knew full well who these foreign wives were. They weren't worshippers of Yahweh, of I am, of God. They were worshipers of some violent, false, regional, ethnic god of the people. Well, unsurprisingly, these women would come over from their own culture and they would bring with them all of these beliefs and values and worship. And the result is not just that underlings in the Old Testament would participate in idolatry. We see a lot of that, but it went all the way up to the top. And the kings, especially in the northern kingdom of Israel, after the first three kings of the United Kingdom, that all happened in the 1000s BC and into the 900s. You had Saul, and then you had David, and then you had Solomon. And you can see some real moral wobbling even amongst those three from the golden age of everything. But after Solomon, the kingdom divides in two. The South, Judah, often struggles with idolatry, but the North pretty much always struggles with idolatry. Struggles is so cute. They like idols, they're not struggling at all. Struggles indicate that they're like, should we? Shouldn't we? I kind of feel a little bad about this. No, overwhelmingly, there's no equivocation. They don't feel bad about it at all. They're just into it, struggles, Matthew. That's adorable. And then eventually, according to God and the prophets, when the northern kingdom gets destroyed after failing to produce a single good king in between 200 and 300 years of being up there and still having God around. They didn't get anything right, they didn't get any kings right up there at all. After failing to do that, God and the prophets finally say, you know, you're done, you're wiped out, you've forgotten to history, you're defeated by the Assyrians in 722. And idolatry is the big thing. That's the big recurrent accusation against them. So when I picture idolatry, the first place my brain goes is the Old Testament because it has this corrosive effect on the people. I mean, they're making an idol out of a bronze calf, seemingly like 10 minutes or like two pages after God parts the Red Sea to free his people from Israel. Is that just uh an Israelite problem? Or is that a human heart problem? Well, I wouldn't ask the question if I wasn't suggesting that it was the latter. Idolatry is, I mean, it was a problem clearly for the people of Galatia. They're overwhelmingly not Jewish. And depending on how you define idolatry, like you know, in our country, maybe you don't uh carve up an idol of Cthulhu or something and put it in your living room and bow down to it. I don't know. I guess I have seen it before, so maybe somebody does that. But there's all kinds of things that occupy that role of prominence and worship where true, like where you're in your heart of heart, this is what your common American person looks to for hope and trust and confidence. So yeah, I think idolatry is something that I visualize in the Old Testament age, but it's not hard to extrapolate those impulses out in like even into stuff in my own life. And be like, nah, this is uh this is not an ancient Jewish thing, this is a human heart thing. And so Paul's calling that out here in his list of things that are just obviously a part of the sinful nature in Galatians 5, 19 through 22. He starts with the sex stuff, the acts of the sinful nature or the flesh are obvious sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery. But then he pivots to this next family of obviously fleshly sinful stuff, and that is idolatry and witchcraft. At the most basic level, idolatry is, of course, making some kind of graven image or even not making an image, but imagining a thing that replaces God and giving it either full-throated, overt worship, like I worship you, O thing that I carved, or de facto worship by how you act and what you do. So when we're talking about the Jews, the people of God, obviously there's a huge block of things to think about regarding idolatry in the Old Testament. But once again, there's not a lot of Jews in the conversation here with the Galatians. Mostly that's the agitators who would be from Jerusalem and steeped in Jewish culture. So why is Paul bringing this up? What would idolatry have looked like to the recipients of the letter to the Galatians? Okay, well. I went and tried to refresh my memory on who those gods were to the Gauls. Julius Caesar wrote about them. I remember this from college in the book he did that he wrote himself, Julius Caesar, called The Gallic Wars. But I went and verified this. He didn't use the names of those gods, Caesar, and the Romans were in the habit of finding the gods that were corollaries to the Roman gods, and then they would use the Roman names to say which of those gods were most honored by these barbarian tribes that they were conquering. So he said that the Gauls most honored Mercury, and then also Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva, all again names of Roman deities, but the Romans were trying to say that, you know, everybody knows about our deities. They just call them by different names. And so these Celtic, Gaulic, Gaulish gods. One of the names that you'll hear bandied about is Lugus or Lugoves, Teotates, Aesus, and Tyrannus. And one that maybe some of you have heard of before, named Epona, who was the Celtic goddess of horses. Epona, that's the name of the pony, right? From the Legend of Zelda stories? I think so. I think that's where I know the name. We have carvings of several of these that are concentrated in Celtic areas in northern and western Europe, but also these carvings are found further afield, particularly in the places where the Gauls or the Celts migrated to in centuries before Rome became a big deal. So we can kind of picture, I mean, you can put eyes on what some of the household deities, the household idols might have looked like that the Galatians would have pictured. I mean, you can look at the goddess Opona and, you know, in the pose and the carving that was apparently pretty common at the time and be like, hey, I bet a lot of these people were picturing this big-headed lady goddess sitting on top of this adorable little pony as an example of a household deity that came with them from the old country. And before Jesus, probably a lot of these people never would have thought of that as being any kind of idolatry. This is just what we do. It's sort of a patron, it's a superstition that brings us all together and tells us a story together. But with the arrival of Christ and the gospel, the declaration that comes with that is this is the one true God, and all of the other ones are fake. And now that you've encountered the one true God, it doesn't make sense anymore. Well, how does this fit into what Paul's saying about the acts of the flesh or the sinful nature being obvious? Well, part of what becomes obvious when you have life by the Spirit is that the one true God is the one true God, and that the worship of any other God doesn't make any sense because it's not a real God. It's a lowercase g God. We didn't make it over to witchcraft. We'll make it to witchcraft tomorrow. What a bizarre subsection in this whole series. I'm going to try to take a bunch of ground on this tomorrow. I don't want to do like one day for every bad thing on the metaphorical pink ticket of things you shouldn't do. So we'll we'll get witchcraft and we'll hustle through a few more so that we can get on to the fruit of the spirit and the end of this book next time around. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.